TradeChat's Panser returns with this week's WoW Insider news recap, where we look back at the hottest news from the past week and whatever other kickin' rad things may have come our way. This week's topics include:

I'm not looking for a buff to warrior DPS. Every time I talk about warriors as DPS (and half the time I talk about warriors as tanks) it comes back around to people assuming I want a DPS buff, but I don't. At least, I'm not asking for our damaging abilities to do more damage. What I am asking for is parity in terms of methods to be able to apply that DPS.

Quite frankly, raiding today has lots of methods to prevent a warrior from doing damage. There are mazes to run, debuffs that force you to switch targets, interrupts to hit, and conditions that will instantly kill you if you don't take them into account. To use one example, let's look at Heroic Jin'rokh. Both his Ionization and Lightning Strike force players to move out of optimal position (you don't want to be decursed of Ionization inside the Conductive Water, or you'll blow up the raid) and in the case of Lightning Strike, you'll spend half the phase dancing around. For a warrior, this is DPS death. We have no abilities outside of a couple of throws (one with a cast time) that can do damage at range, and we have no method to remove Ionization or prevent its application.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Alex is doing the Queue on a Saturday? What is this madness?

gazaa07 asked:

Is there any reason why Pandarans can't be druids? the Pandaran's main lesson was about balance so that (and the elemental - or alemental) are why they are shaman. Balance between light and dark is why they are priests. So wouldn't balance with nature and the giant turtle that is The Wandering Isle allow them to be druids?

For obvious reasons, we asked your intrepid WoW Insider staff how the new patch is going for them. It's always interesting to see how things go once the patch is live, versus the speculation and opinions before the patch.

This weekend is Memorial Day Weekend. To all the heroes -- in America and elsewhere -- who've done so much for us: thank you.

Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) My hunter is getting a lot of love right now. Having a blast finally playing through the horde side of things, although I think the horde population is kinda dead on my realm. May have to relocate...

He bombed Theramore. He stole the Divine Bell. He tried to have Vol'jin murdered. He killed Rhonin (although that may not have been such a bad thing.) But when Garrosh Hellscream sicced his Kor'kron on Gamon, the patron saint of vulnerable, oft-murdered NPCs everywhere, he went too far. Soon, an army of level 5 quilboars, gnolls, murlocs and other quest-bait will swarm on the Warchief, dying by the millions in a pointless assassination attempt. Such is the way of Azeroth. (Thanks to submitter Layonhooves of Drakkari [US-H] for the screenshot!)

Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm.

Back in the era when playing an MMO was an all-or-nothing proposition, choosing a final logout location could be an emotionally overwrought event. Today, however, players drop in and out of games with regularity. We may skip patches or even expansions that don't particularly appeal to us. We may temporarily step out of Azeroth to focus on real-world goals. We may fall out of love with a character and pick up an alt, only to return months or even years down the line.

Even so, I confess to remaining sentimental about where I log out before an extended (or final) absence. I can still tell you exactly where each of my EverQuest characters is camped out, and I've bookmarked a couple of YouTube videos that run past those areas so that I can occasionally recapture their spirit even without access to the game. I'm a little less attached to logout spots for my WoW characters simply because I use nearly all of them at one point or another for screenshots or in-game contacts for WoW Insider. After this many screenshots, they've ended up scattered across some fairly odd spots.

Where will your main character log out for the very last time? Is it someplace you've grown comfortable with over the years? Somewhere representative of that character's adventures or character? A familiar spot behind the counter of a favorite vendor or banker? Or perhaps, like the screenshot above, somewhere holding a tinge of tragedy?

It is absolutely official, now -- I have no idea how the Aspects actually came to be Aspects. For that matter, Tyr's purpose seems to be just as mysteriously vague. However, there was far more light shed on both questions in part four of Dawn of the Aspects, now available for a variety of e-readers. Despite the muddied waters of draconic origins, it is apparent that more of these mysteries will be answered in full by the time the fifth and final installment rolls around.

What did we know, to date? We knew that the Aspects were empowered by various Titans and charged with watching over the world. But that's about it -- the process of how that empowering came about is by and large a giant unknown and has been for years. What surprises me is just how willing I was to let the origin of the dragonflights slide as something that wasn't terribly important, in the long run. But when one considers that their origin appears to be tied to the fate of Tyr, it suddenly bears far more interesting implications.

What's the best way to get Lesser Charms of Fortune every week? Although Blizzard recently reduced the amount of Lesser Charms of Fortune players need each week (by lowering the requirement for the weekly quest Mogu Coins of Fate from 90 charms to 50 charms) we've still got to get them somewhere. So what's the best way?

Prior to patch 5.3, it seemed like everyone was swearing by pet battles. Players were claiming they'd earned hundreds to thousands of Lesser Charms just killing critters in Stormwind. A hotfix eventually nerfed the drop chance for Lesser Charms in lower level pet battles, but higher level pet battles are still rewarding charms to anyone who wants to put in the time. Is it still worth it?

Patch 5.3 has also added a couple of changes to Lesser Charm collection to really mix up the equation. Level 90 creatures that are outdoors in the world now have a chance to drop Lesser Charms of Fortune, while rare spawns in Pandaria and bosses in Battlefield: Barrens are guaranteed to always drop the charms. The result of this? Hordes of players in Northern Barrens farming Lesser Charms off the new Kor'kron mobs there.

I can't remember the last time we ran this video, which is a shame since it's one of the breakthrough machinima hits that brought the hobby to the masses. And by the "masses," I mean me. One of Oxhorn's biggest hits, ROFLMAO remains as hilarious to this day.

Enjoy a few moments of silly WoW song. Sorry if it gets stuck in your head all weekend. Then again, it's better to have in your head that Tik Tok. ROFLMAO!
Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

So, the new patch has been out for a few days now, and one of it's more touted features -- heroic scenarios -- has left us here at WoW Insider all scratching our heads a bit. See, surprisingly, there's no Dungeon Finder option to queue for them, meaning that currently the only way to do them is to get a premade group of three and zone into the scenario from its Azerothian starting point. Talk about a blast from the past! Suddenly visions of Shattrath trade chat in 2009 whirl before me, in which never ending whispers from those poor souls trying to get through heroic Shadow Labyrinth filled my chat log. "Will you tank?" they'd ask. "No," I'd respond. "I'm a healer!" (These were the days before dual specs.)

Ahem. In any case, trade chat has once more filled with calls of "LFM heroic scenarios," something that hasn't been seen around these parts in a while. We're all relearning how difficult it can be to round up a group without the Dungeon Finder around to grease the wheels. So, have any of you managed to successfully corral your groups and get through a heroic scenario or two?

WoW Insider received an email this morning about a small change that has us all a'fluster. Saruya sent us a notification that the restriction preventing players from having more than one death knight per realm has been lifted. We immediately logged into WoW to check this out, and as the eagle eyed among you will be able to see, this is definitely the case. I was able to make six death knights on Argent Dawn, with no issues whatsoever, and many more on other realms.

What's got us a little confused, though, is that we're not entirely sure when the restriction was lifted. Nethaera posted on the official US forums on April 14th, after the release of patch 5.2, that there was no update on when it would be lifted. This implies to us that it's a recent change, but it is conspicuously absent from the patch notes! Funny enough, when you assume there is not the possibility to create more than one DK per realm, you don't often try. So, we thought we'd post this here to clarify: you can now have all the DKs your cold, frostbitten heart desires.

A great question was posted on the official EU forums today by Ferwyn, who asked "if you could make your own minor glyph what would it be?" They had a few suggestions, from a paladin-specific perspective, one of which I quite liked: Glyph of the Ascended, which Ferwyn suggested might make a paladin levitate and their wings flap during Avenging Wrath. This is a fantastic idea! Sure, the animation might be a bit tricky, but who'd let that stand in the way of a floating paladin, right?

Blizzard Community Manager Taepsilum weighed in with their own suggestions, which might randomly switch your title to Murloc on the Inside or Minion of Taepsilum. Title switching is a great idea, but even better, what about a minor glyph that allowed you to shapeshift into a murloc for a few seconds?

And while we're on this topic, what is your favorite minor glyph in the game right now? My high rated ones would be the Paladin Glyph of Winged vengeance, the butterfly wings during Avenging Wrath, and Glyph of the Falling Avenger, which adds slow fall to Avenging Wrath. But the absolute number one minor glyph for me is Glyph of Confession. The secrets are fantastic, and I have spent many a happy while running around my raids and PvP teams making them confess to things. My only complaint is that it's not useable on hostile targets -- how great would that be in arenas?

So if you could make a minor glyph, what would you call it and what would it do?

It's Memorial Day weekend in the United States. And so we feature the Girdle of Eternal Memory. It's a silly, meaningless gesture in the face of the overwhelming sacrifices made by the members of our uniformed services, but it's the one we have. So this weekend, I hope you take a moment or three of silence and consider the words spoken by TIrion:

"We shall take heart in his shining example and in your selflessness. Thank you for all that you have done."Phat Loot Phriday brings you the scoop on some of the most ... interesting ... loot in the World of Warcraft, often viewed through the eyes of the stalwart Throgg and indelible Lolegolas. Suggest items you think we should feature by emailing mikeg@wowinsider.com.

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

Vanilla WoW is properly considered the golden age of this beloved MMO. The evolutionary ideas behind the game were exciting, the art style was fresh, and the world was full of mysteries. Some yearn for a return to that time. But many forget that classes at launch suffered from some truly aggravating designs. Last time on Archivist, we looked at priest racials, hunter mana, warlock shard farming, and shaman weapon skill resets. This week, we review the most aggravating aspects of warriors, mages, druids, rogues, and paladins.

Warriors: The leather conundrum

Let's be fair: warriors, for the most part, had it pretty good in vanilla. Back then, they were the only class that could viably tank and their DPS was better than most hybrids. Rage had its share of problems early on, it's true, but the mechanic worked -- warriors just needed more of it. Stance dancing was annoying to some but the mark of a pro to others. Warriors also had a crippling bug at launch that would register all enemy dodges and parries as misses, preventing skills like Overpower from ever proc'ing. The bug made early leveling painful, but it was solved a few months after launch.

The biggest aggravation for warriors throughout vanilla -- and beyond -- was leather.

Patch 5.3 has added a ton of new content to the game, including some additional battle pets for us all to collect. We've compiled a a rundown of them, including where to find them and what they do. Have at y, pet collectors, and happy hunting!

Burning Crusade raid pets
There are a total of ten new battle pets that can be found in Burning Crusade-era raids. And you thought you were done farming the Karazhan opera!

KarazhanL'il Bad Wolf
The L'il Bad Wolf has a chance to drop from the Big Bad Wolf at the Karazhan opera event. Sadly, the Big Bad Wolf is not a guaranteed boss from the opera, so this pet is likely to be one of the more difficult ones to add to your collection this patch. For the lucky ones who do manage to grab the L'il Bad Wolf, you'll be rewarded with a Humanoid pet possessing Claw, Mangle, Howl, Counterstike, Dodge, and Pounce. While none of those are unique abilities, Mangle is possessed only by two other pets in the game.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Anne Stickney (@Shadesogrey) prefers her pancakes with blueberries. On a plate, not in a tub, thanks.

It's 2am, I am not breakfast, but hey a bowl of Golden Grahams sounds really good right about now.

Puntable1 asked:

They said the 5.3 "quests" were an experiment. Do you think the experiment failed or succeeded? I prefer the 5.2 Isle quests. I think killing Commanders will get old really quick.

Submitter Taedran of Guilty as Charged on Silvermoon (US-A) has captured another high-resolution, long-distance zone picture. This one features the doomed goblin homeland of Kezan at sunset. Sure, it's polluted, tacky and filled with tin-roof shacks, but dammit, it was home. Maybe we shouldn't have centered our entire civilization under the shadow of a giant active volcano, and then mined underneath the giant active volcano, and then built a city where we mined and filled it with alchemists and engineers and other explosion-causing professionals. But hindsight is 20/20.

Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm.

As an obsessive a big fan of battle pets, I was looking forward to everything patch 5.3 had to offer. Tons of battle pet changes, and the slew of new pets for the Raiding With Leashes II: Attunement Edition all had me especially excited. I zipped through The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern hunting for the new pets, and emerged victorious with one. Huzzah! But on my way to Karazhan, I realized I'd need to solo the Chess Event to get to Prince Malchezaar, who also drops a pet.

Keep in mind that even with a great plan, the Chess Event is still plagued with RNG issues. But knowing what to expect will hopefully keep your rage at bay.

Tikari lays out a simple set of moves -- with diagrams -- and priorities to give your king the best chance of surviving, which is the main goal. The event was nerfed to increase the delay between enemy moves, but keep a few tips in mind.

Move your king, and queen if you can, out of the fire immediately. Fire isn't a buff!

Attack the enemy king with your queen, using the Rain of Fire/Poison Cloud ability. Be sure to target the enemy king with the queen's main attack.

The Clerics seem to heal the enemy king more than I remember, but I kept them distracted with other pieces.

Medivh doesn't cheat as quickly as he did before, so you'll have time for about four moves before he does so the first time around. Be sure to at least give your king, ideally your queen as well, space to move. I was able to win in the end by moving backward out of fire, drawing the enemy king into it.

Good luck and be sure to check out Tikari's guide for all the details!

Now, if you've been living in a secluded cave on the shores of Darkmoon Island for a few weeks, it's possible that you might not have heard of patch 5.3. This recent augmentation of the WoW universe hit US servers on Tuesday, and brought with it a bewildering array of changes, several for PvP, along with a ton of class changes, some bigger than others, as well as several new scenarios, and a whole new dynamic environment in the Barrens around Orgrimmar. If you're curious about any of this, you could do worse than checking out WoW Insider's Patch 5.3 coverage.

But the question is, do you really read patch notes? The official patch 5.3 notes appeared the day the patch launched, and as someone who processed them for our post on the matter, I am well aware of the sheer magnitude of this document. So the question stands: do you read patch notes? Personally, I do, to an extent. I will look at the general notes, the PvP notes, as well as the notes for raiding, and any class notes that particularly grab my attention. I won't read the pet battle notes, simply because that's not a part of the game I regularly engage in. And I wonder, therefore, whether, if there's a really exciting patch that makes substantial alterations to pet battles, I am missing it all because I just plain don't read the notes. So how about you? Do you read patch notes? Do you read them selectively? In full? Barely at all? What could Blizzard do with them to better hold your interest?

Deepwing Gorge is the newest battleground in the game, added in patch 5.3. At this precise point in time, it is not in the Rated Battleground rotation, thanks to some bugs, but it will return fairly soon. Nonetheless, this guide is intended for random groups, not for rated teams, who, with additional organization, will be able to execute more complex and precise strategies.

What are we supposed to be doing?

Good question. There are three mines, the Goblin mine, the Center mine, and the Pandaren mine. I wrote about this in more detail back when this was still on the PTR, but suffice it to say, for now, that the Horde has a slight advantage in getting to the Goblin mine, while the Alliance has a slight advantage in getting to the Pandaren mine. As a result of that, a strategy that seems to work well enough for random groups is to split your team, sending around half to the Center mine, and half to either the Goblin or Pandaren mine, depending on which faction you're playing. You will also need to take a few players, depending on your healer numbers, to get the opposite faction's cart. I've been having success with a warrior and a couple of healers as a cart team, but you will need heals at the Center mine, where most of the fighting will take place.

We've talked a lot recently about what's right with WoW. Whether it's the metacommunity, making with the stabby, lore, friends, etc., World of Warcraft keeps us coming back for more. But at the same time, 1.3 million people have left the game since February of this year. WoW still has the most active accounts over all other MMOs at 8.3 million, but people are leaving. Why do you think that is?

Many people complain about the dailies. There are so many and if you are a completionist, your daily to-do list is overwhelming. Others complain about the people. The perceived preponderance of funsuckers in Azeroth can make you not want to log back in, particularly after an unpleasant experience.

While the song is most famous for its presence in Lost Boys, Legs turned it into the soundtrack for Black Angel in 2008. For all that it's full of gothic imagery and moody images, I still love the vision of 3 blood elf angels floating in mid-air. Call me a sucker, but it's still one of my favorite tiny bits of machinima. All that being said, this video is 5 years old. It's just amazing how time flies.
Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

With all the excitement of patch 5.3, you may have missed this interesting little update from Hearthstone: a preview for one of the game board options, Secrets of Stranglethorn Vale. Not only is the artwork beautiful and appropriately atmospheric, but the description hints at a certain interactivity for the player.

If your opponent is taking a long time deciding their move for the turn, an interactive player board offers something for you to do while you're waiting. The Stranglethorn Vale preview also implies that there are going to be multiple different interactive player boards, all based on various zones and cities in WoW. Now I find myself rather curious to see what other areas Blizzard chooses to include as player board options. I'd love to have Desolace, Ashenvale, and the Plaguelands, personally. What kind of boards would you like to spice up your Hearthstone battles?

Frankly, as a solidly Alliance player right now, I find patch 5.3 satisfying. I get why some players don't, but frankly I don't mind spending some time exploring the Horde from an Alliance perspective, without having to faction switch or roll a new character. In fact, I hope it's something they hold onto for future content - I'd love to see a storyline where a group of Horde had to infiltrate Ironforge and work alongside some Dark Irons, or even a story that pit blood elf agents against their forsaken allies by using the worgen as catspaws. My point is, getting to directly interact with Vol'jin was pretty fun, getting to bring the war to the Horde itself while setting up the Darkspear to do the heavy lifting made sense to me, and in general I enjoyed all of the scenarios and quests I've done this patch.

But just because I like something it doesn't follow that you all feel the same way. This patch's story is unfolding in interesting new ways - there's no reputation faction to unlock via daily quests, there are scenarios but no dungeons, and quests that don't repeat. It's quite possible to see much, if not all, of the storyline in one day. It's definitely a departure from what we've seen in previous Mists of Pandaria patches.

While many tout using the mouse for speedy gameplay, you can't overlook the power of the keyboard. While moving and turning is most quickly done with a mouse, it's a slow way to activate spells or open menus, so if you want to speed up your game, it's a good idea to learn WoW's default keyboard shortcuts as well as how to make your own key bindings and macros. We'll cover the basics and help you get started.

WoW's keyboard shortcuts
You may be surprised to see how much you can control with your keyboard. The first step to keyboard mastery is by opening up WoW's key binding interface. Just hit your escape key to open up the game menu and then select Key Bindings. Now, we aren't going to mention every key binding in WoW here, because as you scroll through this menu you'll see there are a lot of them.

As we've mentioned before, one of the biggest changes to patch 5.3 is the ability to get off-spec loot in LFR. It has the potential to be a real game changer for players who occupy a critical non-DPS role. This means if you queue up for LFR as a tank, you'll be able to get DPS gear instead of tanking gear. And for tanks this is especially important, as they always seem to lag behind in DPS gear (while this might not help for a heroic tank having to go DPS, for everyone else it's a boon).

Last night Ghostcrawler tweeted the following:

Ladies and gentlemen, don't forget 5.3 loot spec. It was a common request. Right click on your name plate to change.

Honestly, Ghostcrawler's tweet raises an eyebrow. Why did he do this? Without reading too much into what he's saying, I think it's obvious that to some extent it's because he feels not enough people are aware of it or are using it as they should be (otherwise why say something). I'm wondering if Blizzard has preliminary stats already about the number of people using off-spec loot and it's not where they want it.

One of the reasons for that is it's tucked away in the menu options, somewhere that is relatively hidden from the visual crawl (where you move your view around the window/UI and look for options). Even as a veteran WoW player I occasionally forget that something is in the player menu, and I know there's been a few times when I'm suddenly surprised something's there.

I hope that players are using this to their full advantage; run LFR as a tank and get DPS gear is a pretty sweet deal. What's your use of the function so far, or are you waiting until the weekend to start your LFR runs? For more of the really important things about 5.3 you might have missed, check out or post listing 'em.

Every week, join us as we present you with The WoW Insider Show podcast -- an hour's worth of WoW community discussion covering everything from the week's top stories here on WoW Insider to emails from our readers and what's been going on with our particular characters in Azeroth.

It's been about a decade now since the crash of the Exodar, and the ageless ways of the draenei are beginning to weave themselves into the fabric Azeroth. Yet of all Azeroth's peoples and despite what must be an ancient history, the draenei remain shrouded in a certain amount of mystery. Into that breach steps the draenei guild Kharanei of Wyrmrest Accord (US), working to preserve existing draenei heritage while pushing the culture forward into Azerothian society.

"We're establishing guild canon lore and culture all the time, everything from weddings to holidays to folk tales and language," says Nelua, Kharanei's GM. "We actually invented a week-long holiday to coincide with the Indian Diwali, the Festival of Light (much like Blizzard bases its holidays on existing ones). It commemorates the flight from Argus and the triumph of good over evil while paying respects to those who died fighting the good fight. A large, open-attendance celebration was held in Telaar, and it was very successful -- a very proud moment for the guild."

Kharanei brings more than merely entertaining ideas to the table. A lore-driven council with other Alliance guilds and a storyteller-guided roleplaying framework keep its day-to-day progress feeling fresh and alive, pulling the draenei into an ever-closer relationship with the world they now inhabit.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today.

Today's Queue is dedicated to the magic missile.

It was the first spell that I learned when I was playing the original Baldur's Gate way back when. That spell killed those damn level one wolves roaming around the field right after the old grandfather dude died. I just had to remember not to run into them without being ready.

"I won a contest from the Tauren Think Tank podcast and scored my own Lil' Ragnaros," writes submitter Marconin of Just Wipe It on Draka (US-A). "I was overjoyed to add this guy to my collection ... until I summoned him. Being a gnome, I'm used to things and people towering over me. I'm not used to my pets dwarfing me! I heard you can use him as a cooking fire, but I doubt I'll ever find out for myself. There's no way I'm getting on my tiptoes with a frying pan. I have standards, you know."

Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm.

MrandMrsWoW voiced on their blog what many people in the comments were saying: good behavior is its own reward. They go on to list their reasons why well-behaved players should not be rewarded:

WoW is not school, and should be treated as such!

Good behaviour is a basic human principal and should be a given (whether it is or not is a separate issue)

Rewarding people for being polite will only encourage more scamming of the system

I can't think of a fair way to instigate a reward system: for LFR? For LFG? For guildies? Should we vote? How do we vote?

What is 'well-behaved'? Not swearing? Saying hello? Not ninja-ing loot? I can't see a fair way to judge it.

WE SHOULD NOT BE REWARDING GROWN ADULTS FOR NOT BEING NASTY TO EACH OTHER!

The World of Warcraft may not be school, but there are plenty of school-aged players who could use some guidance in the correct direction of becoming well-behaved adults. It's not WoW's job to parent them, but offering positive reinforcement by peers is not necessarily a school-only thing. With employee of the month awards and merit bonuses being used in the working world, rewarding good behavior is a commonplace tactic used by adults for adults.

Virtually every player eagerly embraced the advent of facts, figures, and formulae driving the game when they first began to trickle through to the player base some years ago. We scoured forums, fan sites, and data-driven websites like Wowhead. A way to tell which gear worked best for your character? Sweet. Community managers and devs who actually explained and discussed game mechanics? Utterly amazing. It was a brave new world and an entirely new way to play. Gone were the days when players murmured longingly of eloquently named pieces whose names evoked the epic locations they came from. Now, it was all about tiers. We argued endlessly over the correct numerical sequencing of armor sets -- remember the etymological debate over "Dungeon 2" vs. "Tier 0.5"?

A little bit of knowledge about how to tinker under the hood is absolutely a positive and helpful thing. Today, we expect free access to ability and spell mechanics and a point-by-point road map to gearing up. But at some point, overachievers that we humans are, so many numbers can make the game feel more like a checklist of benchmarks than a storied progression of fantastic encounters and arcane gear.

Whether or not all the analysis gets under your skin, it's easy to see how this emphasis on precision and analysis evolved. The question is, do you think that this is merely a subjective matter of roleplay immersion in the fantasy aspect of World of Warcraft, or do you think the attitude actually reduces the game in spirit and heart? Do the vistas and horizons of Azeroth ever seem uncomfortably closer when every step is paved with a formula pointing to your destination? Where do we stand on the balance scale of pre-analyzing and measuring how the numbers stack up vs. gaining a feel from experience for how things work in the world of Azeroth?

Another day, another set of hotfixes. Patch 5.3 has not been without its hiccups, with a reasonable list of known issues appearing from Blizzard earlier today. But the developers are fixing the issues as quickly as they appear, with changes already in place to work out the problems encountered in the seat of knowledge, where the lack of a graveyard meant that players were unable to retrieve their corpses. A hotfix has been made which allows players who have died in the Seat of Knowledge to fly back to their bodies with a Spectral Gryphon (Wisp for Night Elves) or a Spectral Wyvern.

Is this the first step towards Blizzard allowing corpse flying in Pandaria? Check out all the hotfixes after the break.

Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka tweeted just a short while ago about the temporary removal of one of patch 5.3's shiny new systems: the one that balances healer numbers in opposing random battleground teams.

@phxtich We had to disable the healer balance system as it had a bug that only revealed itself with live numbers of users.

Holinka later confirmed that this issue was the one that was causing some players to experience very long queue times for random battlegrounds, an issue that had cropped up in several places on the official forums. His tweet said that players, both healers and DPS, were becoming "stuck" in the queue.

As a result, the system has now been temporarily disabled. This means that teams with unequal healer numbers will reappear, so don't be surprised that the system is not working. Bugs do happen, and as I'm always going on about, PvP is a rare thing on the PTR. So it's no surprise that, when big new features like this go live, they might not withstand the strain. If you want to stop these problems, don't QQ, get on the next PTR and make with the stabby. You'll be doing yourself a favor! And while you're waiting, WoW Insider has a guide on helping the healers you do have in random battlegrounds.

Community Manager Crithto took to the forums, asking for feedback about changes to the mechanical and elemental pet battle families. As of right now, elemental attacks have both an offensive and defensive advantage over mechanical, making it imbalanced compared to the other families. Blizzard proposes to change which families both types of pets have an advantage against:

One set of changes proposes:

Critters would replace elementals in taking less damage from mechanical attacks

Dragonkin would replace critters in taking less damage from elemental attacks

Elementals would replace dragonkin in taking less damage from flying attacks

and the other:

Elementals would replace aquatic pets in taking less damage from undead attacks

Aquatic pets would replace elementals in taking less damage from mechanical attacks

The second set of suggested changes would require less alteration to the current system and therefore has my vote. Do you have an opinion? If so, take advantage of Blizzard's request for player input and cast your vote in the forums.

Work Warning: Lots of cursing and vaguely adult themes. A touch on the adult side.

Ian Beckman is a man who delivers. Whether it's a surprising range of comedic voice acting or solid graphics that deliver the funny, his machinima always serves up more than a few laughs. Guards 3 continues to lampoon COPS in this wild World of Warcraft.

I like how the small vignette turns into a larger story, and I'll admit the final bit was my favorite. Whether that's because I harbor my own angst about the king, or just because it was the most straightforward joke, the utter defeat of the villain serves as warning to anyone who gets a name wrong.
Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

You've probably heard the term "WoW clone" applied to nearly every MMO out there, because as WoW borrowed ideas from older games like EverQuest, so newer games borrow from WoW. And any game with WoW-like features -- by which we mean nearly any MMO -- might get branded with the label "clone," no matter how good it is. However, some of these myriad WoW clones strike us as particularly... well, let's call it familiar.

Now don't get us wrong -- these aren't bad games, and every game builds on its predecessors in an attempt to make something better. But if you're looking for something that's distinctly different from WoW, none of these are going to fit the bill. However, any of them may be an entertaining change of pace or just an amusing venture into what some of the other MMOs on the market are doing.

Tricks of the Trade is a strange ability for rogues. Why would we sacrifice our own damage (by spending energy) to boost the damage of someone else? Aldriana and Pathal have both spoken out against TotT's misguided benevolence and its boring mechanics. Rather than being a situationally-useful ability that we pull out when the time is right, TotT has become a set-and-forget chore that we just auto-cast on the second-highest DPS in raid.

Lore issues aside, Tricks of the Trade is a pretty good ability. Used properly, it can greatly accelerate the rate that tanks pick up aggro, which makes dungeons and raids just a bit easier. While it's a DPS loss for the rogue casting TotT, it's a net gain for the raid's DPS, and that's a sacrifice that we'll have to make. It's also incredibly potent in PvP; granting an ally a 15% damage boost is a pretty big deal.

A little while ago, we did a "Top ten most beautiful spots in WoW" post, and many commenters had an interesting request: a companion post of the ten most desolate places in WoW. We thought it was a great idea, so we're taking the suggestion to heart. This was an interesting topic to think about, because the desolate spots in WoW are the ones I tend to avoid. For the most part, I don't want to spend my fun WoW time in virtual wastelands! Then again, sometimes those deserted, eerie places have a haunting beauty all their own. Check out our list, and tell us your own favorite desolate places in World of Warcraft!